Well, this post may appear fairly arbitrary. If you know me at all, you know that I am a bit of a statistics whore and ultimately I try to graph a lot of things I am curious about. This includes my gas consumption. At first I thought, who the hell would want to know how much gas I use over a year? Well maybe someone that has the same car as I do, or someone curious about gas usage over the course of a year. Anyway, that's why I'm posting this information.
Some background:
I started driving last year when I moved from Toronto and all of a sudden I needed a job to get to work. So I have a 2007 Dodge Caliber, which I mostly use to get from home to work and the university. I live around 40Km away from work and from my school.
A very significant chunk of my driving is on the highway, most of it between 70-90 Km/h. This will obviously affect my mileage, since that range falls pretty much on the most gas efficient range for a car like mine.
I drove somewhere between 25-30k Km in these 12 months and I change my oil every 10k Km because I have been using the synthetic stuff (mainly for convenience since the cost doesn't seem that different).
So just to clarify the figure. Series 2 is the one that accounts for each time I pump my gas. I note how many liters of the regular gas I pump, and using that number I divide the difference in kilometers from the moment I pump the gas to my last pit stop. It may seem obvious to some, but maybe not to all.
Gas Consumption = (mileage now / mileage last time) / litres pumped
There are some missing points and whatnot, which I apologize for, I just never thought I would have to show my work to anyone as I was doing it.
Anyway, that's for series 2, series one is a moving average, basically taking into account the cumulative average, which produces a much smoother curve and an interesting trend. Note that when I began my measurements around 53K my gas consumption was around 12 Km/L. That was around March/April of 2012. The trend was definitely upwards until it peaked over the summer months. I live in Canada, so once we started to see winter my consumption went up; and then once snow started to be a factor, well you can tell when that happened.
Anyway, the data isn't perfect, but it does give a nice little clue on how my car performs over the year, also gives me a good grasp of how much gas I'm burning with this vehicle. I hope this is useful to someone at some point, if I get some feedback on this I might do my next little project, which will be looking at creating some data for the gas dial in my car so that I can perhaps compare different speeds and different scenarios to see what's the most efficient way to drive for me.
